The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,280 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Short Cuts
Lowest review score: 0 Gummo
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,381 out of 20280
  2. Mixed: 8,435 out of 20280
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20280
20280 movie reviews
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  1. Approaching the Elephant
    Ms. Wilder, in her debut feature, riskily opts to leave much of the children’s educational activity fairly vague. Which gives it one more thing in common with school: You need to pay attention.
  2. All the Wilderness
    Mr. Johnson doesn’t give fateful weight to the breadcrumbs that guide James forward. Glancing encounters and faltering conversations unfold lightly and with a visual seductiveness that the cinematographer, Adam Newport-Berra, crescendos in the film’s drifting, transformative middle section.
  3. McFarland USA
    Aims to be rousing rather than revelatory, and it mostly succeeds.
  4. Hot Tub Time Machine 2
    Whether something did or didn’t happen, and the comic confusion as the future bumps into the past: those are the smart parts of a movie that is not as idiotic as it pretends to be.
  5. Queen and Country
    Queen and Country doesn’t quite have the bittersweet intensity of its precursor. The terrible magic of the war is missing, and so is the heightened, wide-eyed perceptiveness of the child protagonist.
  6. Coast of Death
    The director’s wide frame encompasses vast terrain from a middle vantage point, achieving views and noticing changes over time that a mere passer-by might not.
  7. Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead
    Ambulant corpses may be tramping all over our movie and television screens these days, but Wyrmwood has enough novelty — and more than enough energy — to best its minuscule budget.
  8. Hits
    The gloriously scabrous ending to it all leaves the viewer wishing this talented writer had let it rip earlier.
  9. The Last Five Years
    In Mr. Jordan’s portrayal of Jamie, this handsome talented musical theater performer (“Newsies”) goes for the jugular in taking down his character and making him insufferable.
  10. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
    With her dramatically pale face framed by a voluptuous dark cloud of hair, Ms. Elkabetz is never more effective than when she’s holding still, her face so drained of emotion that it transforms into a screen within the screen on which another, indelibly private movie is playing.
  11. White Rabbit
    While White Rabbit is not a lost cause, its difficult story of mistreatment and lashing out proves too much of a challenge to tell well.
  12. What We Do in the Shadows
    This weird and witty spoof filters the routines of the living through the lens of the long dead.
  13. The Rewrite
    That Mr. Grant can bring Keith back from the edge more or less persuasively is a testament to his ability to convey genuine humility without mawkishness, once he sees the light.
  14. Kingsman: The Secret Service
    The problem is that Mr. Vaughn has no interest in, or perhaps understanding of, violence as a cinematic tool. He doesn’t use violence; he squanders it.
  15. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
    It’s not especially horrifying, or even very thought-provoking. It is touching, however, because it represents one frequently misunderstood, intermittently great filmmaker’s tribute to another.
  16. Fifty Shades of Grey
    Fifty Shades of Grey might not be a good movie — O.K., it’s a terrible movie — but it might nonetheless be a movie that feels good to see, whether you squirm or giggle or roll your eyes or just sit still and take your punishment.
  17. Boy Meets Girl
    Placing sex and gender identity at the center of almost every conversation, the writer and director, Eric Schaeffer, is so keen to demythologize that the film’s potentially most affecting moments are too often smothered by the hackneyed characters and setups that surround them.
  18. The Other Man: F.W. de Klerk and the End of Apartheid
    None of this is particularly cinematic (he relies much too heavily on title cards to fill in historical blanks), but it is engaging, mainly because the stakes were so high and the statesmanship so delicate.
  19. Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine
    In lingering over moody night streets and trembling faces, Ms. Josue has brought this film to the verge of becoming a tear-jerker. But, as epitomized in an extraordinary scene with a conflicted priest, it’s all part of a shared soul-searching that still continues.
  20. 1971
    Ms. Hamilton’s straightforward documentary skillfully interweaves reminiscences by members of the group with re-enactments of the burglary.
  21. Love, Rosie
    Whether the material is “Much Ado About Nothing” or “When Harry Met Sally,” if your story requires keeping true loves apart, it is often polite to pass the time with a steady flow of comedy.
  22. Outcast
    The barnacle-encrusted plot...is dumbed down to the studs.
  23. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water
    The new film displays enough nutty writing and sheer brio to confirm the stamina of its enduring and skillfully voiced characters.
  24. Seventh Son
    If nothing else, it’s amusing to imagine what [Mr. Bridges] and Ms. Moore chatted about between takes and how each managed to keep from cracking up, more or less.
  25. Jupiter Ascending
    With its nods to the original “Star Trek” and David Lynch’s proto-steampunk hallucination “Dune,” it seduces the eye with filigreed flourishes even as the mind reels from some of the mildewy storytelling.
  26. Call for Help
    If the point of Call for Help is to glorify a handful of off-the-grid heroes, it fails. If the point is to follow some young people who took their aimless wanderlust to a trouble spot and perhaps created more problems than they solved, it succeeds.
  27. On the Way to School
    On the Way to School never wavers in its bland uplift.
  28. Enter the Dangerous Mind
    Partly thanks to Ms. Reed — as well as to Scott Bakula, as Wendy’s beleaguered boss, and minor players — the movie has its share of underplayed little scenes of realistic color.
  29. Ballet 422
    Ballet 422 elegantly conveys the complex collaborations behind even a relatively modest production, and the toil and discipline that somehow deliver, for the patrons on opening night, a seamless spectacle of grace.
  30. Mad As Hell
    It’s a job requirement for a show host like Mr. Uygur to project his personality and beliefs; this filmmaker doesn’t muster a healthy skepticism to match.
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